


Grace

by dismantlingsummer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Darth Vader (Comics), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Anakin can have a little redemption, Angst, Because I like his pretty face, Darth Vader Redemption, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Less burnt up Anakin, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine, Post-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Sort Of, That's not how Darth Vader's suit works, as a treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-27 15:13:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30124713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dismantlingsummer/pseuds/dismantlingsummer
Summary: Shortly after Mustafar, Anakin realizes what he has done. He finds Obi-Wan to beg for death.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 8
Kudos: 109





	Grace

**Author's Note:**

> Based on issue 5 of the Dark Lord of the Sith comics. Basically, (spoiler), Anakin is slammed with a force-vision of a version of himself who comes back to the light, murders Sidious, and goes to find Obi-Wan. I desperately wanted more of this scene and so am begrudgingly writing it myself. I am DEEPLY curious what would have happened if Anakin had actually come to his senses, so tell me in the comments what you think!!! Angst w me!!
> 
> (Or just read & review.)
> 
> P.S. Many many liberties are taken with Anakin's suit, and probably lots canon things, as I am returning to this fandom for the first time since middle school and in case y'all haven't noticed, canon is complicated.

Obi-Wan was meditating when he felt it: a presence like an open wound.

Not quite dark. Not quite light either. Something he both recognized and didn’t.

He opened his eyes.

He had already heard about Darth Vader's survival and rebirth. It nearly destroyed the last of him. Still it was another thing entirely to see him standing there like some impossible mirage under the dessert suns of Tatooine. The light that should have glinted off his black metallic suit somehow absorbed into nothing. Even if he hadn’t sensed him, he would have heard the vocoder breathing. The pain was instant, was crushing. The skeletal mask did not move as the voice within spoke: “Obi-Wan.” Before his heart could betray him once again, Obi-Wan stood. He activated his lightsaber. And the Sith Lord before him dropped to his knees.

Darth Vader lifted both hands, and removed his helmet. Smoke hissed out.

There were the mangled scars, crisscrossing the face. The hair just coming back in. And most critically the eyes: deep blue.

“Please,” he said.

Obi-Wan powered down his lightsaber. The recognition came so quickly it nearly brought him to his knees as well. “Anakin,” he said.

Anakin’s eyes closed. His shoulders slumped. And he collapsed unconscious into the sand.

Time stood still.

He moved Anakin inside the hut. It was not as easy as it had once been. Once he would have been able to merely sling him over his shoulders. They had carried each other so often over the years. Now it was difficult work. When he had gotten Anakin to the bed, he examined the helmet. He was struck not only how the suit worked to make its wearer appear monstrous, but to dehumanize its wearer from the inside too. He found that the helmet, obstinately in the name of medical assistance, blocked out most light and purity of sound. It could provide a great deal of data on one’s surroundings and provide many advantages for battle, but it greatly diminished quality of life. Inspecting the rest of the uncomfortable – perhaps painful – looking suit, he suspected he would find other such features. He wondered what was salvation, and what was punishment.

By the time Anakin stirred, Obi-Wan was preparing to make tea. He had a vague idea that Anakin’s collapse might have had to do with the powerful heat, and whatever journey he had just underwent, but he also suspected it might have to do with none of that at all. Once he would have checked Anakin for any injuries. Now he left the suit where it was, save for one thing - he had placed the helmet back on his former Padawan. It was again through the distorted mechanics of the vocoder that he heard Anakin speak again: “I never expected to find you here, of all places.”

Obi-Wan kept his back to him as he placed the kettle to boil over flame. “I had to go _somewhere_ you wouldn’t think to look. Of course, that didn’t seem to work out, did it?”

“I had a vision when I returned to Mustafar. All of a sudden I understood what I had done, and what I had to do. Eventually it would lead me here. But after our – after we parted, I had no idea where you had gone. Only that I wanted to find you, and kill you.”

“I would think the newly-infamous Darth Vader would know many things.”

“Darth Vader knew nothing at all,” Anakin said.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. It was another moment before he was able to turn back to Anakin, to walk over and take a seat. When he did, Anakin removed the helmet once more and sat it down by the bed. “I can go for short times without it,” he offered. Without the vocoder, his voice was raspier than it had been, but the outer rim drawl came in stronger. Obi-Wan breathed in and out, several times.

“What happened, Anakin?” he asked.

“I killed Darth Sidious. And many of his most senior advisors. You and whoever else is left will need to act quickly though if you are going to dismantle the Empire. I have a list…”

“Of the Jedi you hadn’t yet killed,” Obi-Wan said quietly.

“Yes,” Anakin said. “Of the Jedi I hadn’t yet killed.”

The kettle began to whistle. It didn’t take long in this heat. Anakin looked at him in disbelief. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Obi-Wan crossed the small hut and took the kettle off the flame. It was easier to concentrate on this, to pour the water into the two mugs, and steep the tea leaves. Unlike Obi-Wan, Anakin favored tea with caffeine in it, and flavorful spices. “Can you drink?” he asked.

The reply was little more than a choked garble: “Yes.”

He placed the two cups upon the circular table that separated himself and Anakin. Steam rose in twin furls.

“You must hate me,” Anakin said.

“Hate is not the way of the light.”

“I have done so many terrible things. I betrayed everyone. I betrayed everything you raised me to stand for. I massacred the Jedi like they were cattle. The younglings, too. And Padme—” Anakin swallowed, his face working quickly, the scars wrinkling and smoothing. “Padme is dead because of me.”

“I was angry with you,” Obi-Wan said. He could hear the steel in his voice, the ice that sometimes seemed to freeze over all of him, make him numb and blind to the Force. For months he had been trying, and failing, to find his center, his calm, a fumbling way of moving forward in the endless loneliness of his new reality. For months he had awoken in the middle of the cool desert night gasping and shouting, his tunic shirt stuck to his chest in sweat, a thousand names and no names at all on his lips. “I am still angry with you,” he said. “I never would have believed you had the capacity to disappoint me so immensely, or betray us all so completely. Not once until the end.”

“Angry,” Anakin repeated. “Disappointed. That’s…that’s inadequate. You must, you must—” His face suddenly paled, and he gasped briefly. He took the helmet and jammed it back on his head. There was a pause before the deep breathing began again, artificial and unrelenting. Obi-Wan waited until Anakin had caught his breath. He waited until he was able to show his face once more. By the time Anakin removed his helmet again, Obi-Wan found that ice had begun to thaw, just a little. His voice when he spoke again was gentler.

“Mostly I grieved for you. Because I feared you were gone forever.”

Something in Anakin’s face shifted, showed something like the hurt, sullen expression Obi-Wan remembered so well from his Padawan years, when Anakin was always looking for some greater praise, some deeper affirmation, some final piece of himself to be slotted into place. “And yet – you didn’t kill me. That would have been the most merciful thing you could have done.”

“I didn’t kill you,” Obi-Wan agreed. “That would have been the most merciful thing I could have done.”

He reached for his tea, and took a long sip. In the humidity of the steam he could feel it again: the burning heat of Mustafar, the rage and darkness in the Force, the yellow in Anakin’s eyes. He could feel his final and most complete failing, the one attachment he could not let go of, the horrible, mutilated figure (mutilated by _his_ hand) burning on the lava banks, face twisted into an unrecognizable mask of hatred and rage…and also terror. He thought he would always remember Anakin, the hero with no fear, like that. So, so miserably afraid, so afraid he was sick with it, had let it poison his mind and heart, until he was nothing but a burning husk, and Obi-Wan was too shattered, too heartbroken and furious and devastated, to deal the killing blow.

“I am not perfect, Anakin,” Obi-Wan muttered. Over his cup he saw Anakin’s face jerk up, the same way he always did when he was younger and Obi-Wan had lowered his guard and admitted some fault, some vulnerability. “I know for many years, you thought that—that I thought I was. But I’ve made many mistakes in my lifetime. I just never thought one of my mistakes was loving you.”

The smell of burnt flesh in the air. The memory of the holocron footage, playing on repeat. All of his people, his family, his order, his world – gone, before he could comprehend it.

“It was more than I could bear,” Obi-Wan said.

“You keep saying that,” Anakin said. He reached for his tea and clutched it clumsily in one gloved, mechanical hand. There was a vein pulsing in his forehead, an anger in the Force that felt hot and desperate, like a fever. “That you—that you loved me.”

Obi-Wan kept his features perfectly still. He breathed in and out. He did not when it had started. Perhaps it was impossible to know really when loving someone did. He had felt so many things in the wake of his Master’s death, and sometimes nothing at all, just a terrible emptiness, a shadow of things to come. He had been little more than a Padawan himself when he had begun training the formerly enslaved child from Tatooine. He had never known what he was doing.

“Do you— _could_ you—still?” Anakin asked.

“Yes, dear one,” Obi-Wan said.

“After all I’ve done.”

“After all you’ve done.”

“You—you shouldn’t.”

“I’m afraid you’ve never given me much of a choice.”

“You don’t understand,” Anakin said. His voice was still choked, but in a different way now. His eyes blazed, bright and wet, and _blue_. In them Obi-Wan saw all of his lost people: saw Satine, saw Ahsoka, saw Qui-Gon. _Only Padme,_ he thought dimly, _Padme had brown eyes, like deep rich soil, or a bottle when the light hits it right._ “I don’t deserve it. I came here to ask you to finish the job. And if you really do love me, you’ll do it right this time.”

Beyond the dunes, closer than Anakin would have believed, there was a baby. And far off into space, past cosmos and stars and planets home to all kinds of lifeforms, was another.

There was a deep exhale in the Force around him as the bright anger rushed out, and left something cleaner in its wake, something sad and empty, like the whistling distance of a great fall.

Anakin said, one more time: “Obi-Wan, please.”

Very slowly, Obi-Wan reached a hand out to Anakin’s. Underneath the glove, the suit, the deadly exterior – underneath it all he knew there a golden cybnertic hand that he knew as well as his own. He had tried, over the years, in so many different ways, all through that veneer forged in the Temple and throughout his own apprenticeship, to communicate the many things he felt. He found now, back where it all began, on a dusty insignificant planet on the edge of the galaxy, that once again the words had left him, that there was no way to convey the immense rush of feeling he felt, in the Force and in his own, fallible human heart, in knowing that Anakin had returned, in the end.

But of course, it wasn’t the end.

Obi Wan said, “There is a lot of work to be done. We could use your help.”

“My help?”

He nodded, one hand unconsciously coming up to smooth over his beard. “You are right; we must act quickly. The list will be a good start.”

“You cannot trust me,” Anakin said. “I cannot trust myself. I killed so many.”

“Even so,” Obi-Wan said lightly. “You did not succeed in killing Anakin Skywalker. And I could use him. I seem to recall, back in the Clone Wars, that we made a pretty good team.”

“I don’t know if I can do it, Master,” Anakin said. “I deserve to be punished. I—I need to be. I need it to be over.”

“Perhaps that is your punishment,” Obi-Wan said. “You must try to live on.”

Another silence, inexplicable and strange, as if time had stopped, everything still and unimportant but for this remote hut in the middle of nowhere, and the two of them inside of it, grasping at language, at the things language could never begin to express. For the first time in a long time, he felt the Force gathering around him at full strength, around the both of them, and in the Force he felt a deep, endless feeling, a grace he hadn’t known he needed, a grace he hadn’t known he could give.

Anakin took a small, careful sip of his tea, his throat working with some effort. “I haven’t drunken anything in a long time,” he admitted.

“I can’t imagine Darth Siduous was known for his teamaking. The Sith have an absolutely _dreadful_ sense of hospitality.”

Anakin laughed. The sound was hoarse and strange, as if newly remembered. And then he started, without any visible tears, to cry.

Obi-Wan placed his cup down. He stood up and sat down on the bed next to his former Padawan. He would let him cry as long as he needed too. He would let him feel all of the terrible things he had done, and he would let him mourn for them, and understand the true gravity of their weight. That was, after all, the way of the Jedi, of his people. The sins of the past could not be forgotten, could not be redeemed, or erased, or perfectly made right again. But the work kept going. The planets continued their many orbits; the universe its infinite expansion. The past could not be forgotten. But it could be lived with. It _had_ to be lived with. They would do what they could to make things better.

And in the meantime, there was tea and there was quiet. And through the windows, the light of the twin suns creeping in.


End file.
